From NIMBY to YIMBY: San Jose forges difficult path to winning over neighbors in sheltering homeless

When the city of San Jose first proposed building “tiny homes” for homeless people in a park smack in the center of Marsey Kahn’s South San Jose neighborhood in 2017, she and her neighbors fought it bitterly — and won.

Now, eight years later, the neighborhood is so pleased with an alternative project that just opened last month, on Cherry Avenue across the Guadalupe River, residents here raised money for welcome baskets and wrote kindly notes with each one. Many of them even gave up their weekend to set up bedrooms with sheets, laundry supplies and shower caddies. The modular building has 130 beds with individual rooms, 24-hour security, and job and health services for the residents.

“We’ve been part of the complaining group for a long time about getting these people out of here — they’re polluting the creek, they’re building fires,” said Kahn, whose home in the Thousand Oaks neighborhood backs up to the river where homeless encampments flourished. “So I don’t want to always be the complainer. I want to be part of the solution.”

How the residents here and in the adjacent Erikson neighborhood in South San Jose turned from NIMBYs to YIMBYs offers a civics lesson in how good government, goodwill and trust can overcome the kinds of objections that have doomed attempts to manage the homeless crisis.

The Yes-In-My-Backyard mentality didn’t come, however, without years of drama and frustration — and a tragedy.

In February 2019, a few blocks from Kahn’s house, Bambi Larsen was stabbed to death in her home, and a homeless man was arrested at an encampment three miles away, charged with murdering her. His case is in limbo after he was found mentally incompetent to stand trial, but it terrified neighbors whose properties backed up to tent encampments and were already dealing with out-of-control campfires and break-ins. They felt desperate for a solution. It wouldn’t come for another six years.

“You look out and see all the encampments,” said Dave Noel, president of the Erikson neighborhood association, recalling the view from the home of a neighbor who moved away. “They would hear the fighting and dogs barking.”

Unlike the 2017 tiny homes project, the Cherry Avenue project near Almaden Expressway and Highway 85 was built closer to a commercial district with Safeway and Bass Pro Shops on the site of a former tent encampment. People there used to submerge grocery carts to build a bridge across to the neighborhood.

When San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan first ran for City Council to represent the Almaden Valley in early 2020, he got an earful from neighborhood associations about the city’s growing homeless encampments.

“They were skeptical,” Mahan said, “and I came to the realization that the only way we were going to get buy-in was to be able to commit to our neighbors that if they take on a solution to homelessness, their neighborhood will be made better, not worse off, and that we’re going to guarantee it.”

Not all aspects of the mayor’s approach have been universally adopted by local officials, however, who criticized his plan to allow the city to issue citations or arrest homeless people who repeatedly refuse shelter. Santa Clara County Supervisor Sylvia Arenas, who has expressed concern over the mayor shifting funds away from permanent housing projects to build temporary ones, has nonetheless embraced the Cherry Avenue project. Her office donated $1,000 to help fill more welcome baskets.

“It is critical that the city, the county, and our community work together on sustainable funding for both long term and short term housing,” Arenas said in a statement, “an approach that continues to be the most effective way of reducing homelessness.”

Mahan’s approach, which focuses more on offering shelter than making arrests, was applauded by Elizabeth Funk, the CEO of San Francisco-based DignityMoves, the nonprofit that oversaw the project.

In San Francisco, where DignityMoves spearheaded a housing project in the Tenderloin neighborhood three years ago, Funk said that, unlike in San Jose, the city failed its promise to neighbors to keep the nearby sidewalks clear of encroaching homelessness.

“We can’t find a site in San Francisco because all the neighborhoods are vehemently opposed. And you know what? I don’t blame them,” Funk said. “The right way to do this, and the way we’ve done it with San Jose, is bringing in the neighbors and getting them bought in.”

Ever since the San Jose encampments along the Guadalupe were cleared and the homeless people offered housing at the Cherry Avenue project, neighbors have had few complaints. A couple of weeks ago, when Kahn’s neighbors noticed a few tents springing up behind their back fence again and made a call to authorities, “they got rid of them really fast” — a reassuring sign that the city was keeping its promise.

“There’s relief for sure — fire was my biggest concern — but not just for us as a community,” Kahn said. “There’s relief for the people that it’s helping, because their circumstances were terrible, right? It’s a win for them. It’s a win for us, and it’s a win for the creek, because the pollution is going to stop.”

City Councilmember Pam Foley helped put together the welcome baskets for the Cherry Avenue site in November, along with senior citizens living in an assisted living home down the street who wrote personal notes to go with them.

“It’s remarkable how much the neighbors really want to help, really want to bring in their unhoused neighbors indoors and help them be part of the community,” Foley said.

The reception from these neighbors is a far cry from the initial opposition to the Bristol Hotel project across town, when the city moved in more than 40 women from the Columbus Park homeless encampment. Neighbors behind the hotel, who hadn’t had a homeless problem, feared the hotel would import one.

But three months after the Bristol welcomed the homeless women, the neighbors have few complaints. If someone does call about an issue, Foley said, the city sends someone out to take care of it.

Mayor Mahan believes his approach, which focuses on getting people into a dignified shelter now instead of waiting years for funding and construction of affordable housing projects, is making an immediate difference.

This year, some 23% fewer people died on the streets of San Jose, from 197 to 155 — most from drug and health-related causes.

Last month, he participated in a memorial to those who perished, including many from violence and exposure to extreme weather. They lit candles and read the names aloud and “reflected, frankly, on failures of governance in California to get everybody indoors and save lives.”

Outside the security gate at the Cherry Avenue housing project last week, Tiffany Jones, 29, was getting on her bike to do some shopping. For the past six years, she had lived in a tent along the river at this very site.

She moved into the Cherry Avenue project, with her own bedroom and a door that locks, three weeks ago. She is taking advantage of programs to get a job, she said, and is saving money from recycling and panhandling to get her own place. She’s grateful for the welcome basket that included toiletries and other essentials.

“I really hope that they see that we’re trying to get on our feet,” she said. “I really just hope that they’re going to give us a chance now to become part of their society, instead of judging us so much.”